Publicize: Twitter

October 8, 2009

Mike Adams

We dig Twitter over here at WordPress.com (check us out at @wordpressdotcom). With the launch of our newest Publicize feature, we dig it even more since you can now tweet your WordPress.com posts automatically.

You can stick with the default, automatically generated tweet, or customize it to your heart’s content.

The feature can be enabled from your Dashboard → My Blogs admin page. Once you enable it, you’ll be directed through an authorization procedure to confirm that you want to connect your WordPress.com blog and your Twitter account.

Just like the Yahoo! Updates Publicize feature, these connections are per blog and per user, so those of you with several blogs can choose which ones to connect, and those of you with multiple authors on one blog can each hook up your Twitter accounts separately.

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Not being able to remember the customized text is adding one more step in pushing a blog post. With Twitterfeed, I don’t have to worry about anything, though it is certainly assuring to have a short URL of the same company, something which I can only get if I enable this option at WP. Please consider making customized text stick to the settings.

1. Great feature
2. the WP url shortener is not really short – would be better to allow users to choose from some top url shorteners
3. the “posted to WP.com” text is annoying and wastes 17 of 140 characters; would be more user friendly if it just put the post Title in there + shorter url & allowed editing
4. if you modify the Twitter post text, save your draft, then publish later – it seems to default back to the “posted to WP.com” text rather than whatever it was changed to

Twitter Publicize should no longer send out tweets for old posts that you’re just updating. If you want the tweet sent out, you can manually click the Publicize Edit link and click the Twitter checkbox.

Hmmm… I’ll stick with Twitterfeed until I can set a custom tweet prefix for each blog, I think! Or even a single custom prefix for all of them. “Posted to WP.com: ” eats a lot of my available characters.

Just tested this for the first time and it is absolutely real time and quick, works very well. Since the URL is already referring to wp.com domain, I request that you remove the preceding text from the box so we don’t have to follow one extra step in pushing the blog post out. Those who wish to add something personal to the tweet (besides their blog post itself) can always add an additional text.

hi!!
great idea, if only it worked well!
This is the message I get when I try to authorize twitter:

“This page is no longer valid. It looks like someone already used the token information you provided. Please return to the site that sent you to this page and try again … it was probably an honest mistake.”